REVIEW: “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera” at the Tate Modern

Surveillance Surveyed: “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera” at Tate Modern 28 May– 3 October 2010

Firstly, I have to say that I have been very excited to see this show. I remember sitting in Serge Plantureux’s upstairs office pad 3 years ago during Paris Photo, looking at execution images while comrade Robert Flynn Johnson (then yet to be a friend) spoke with Serge about surveillance images.

Serge had shown Robert and his friend mental asylum images made in a camp in Russia where they segregated the mentally ill into a separate community. Robert’s cohort at the time turned out to be no other than SFMOMA’s curator Sandra Gilman who organized this exhibition with Simon Baker, the new head curator of photography at the Tate. Baker’s premier is one of the reasons for such high expectations of this show “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera”.
This exhibition is Baker’s first curatorial adventure within the institution. here is a need to show his intellectual interest in photography as well as providing a show of public draw. Not an easy task. The topic itself is something of a multi-headed hydra. Where many fields of practice in photography draw on various political economies of image making, this topic has the opportunity to reveal to its audience its own paradigms of living in a “Big Brother” state, especially here in England. The irony of this, of course, is that the survey is historical to a degree. This seems to make apparent while also rubbing in the viewer’s face, photography’s role in limiting our civil liberties. Eroded as expected, we pay money to ha¬¬ve this topic presented to us in an internationally recognized art institution. So in a sense, the bubble of irony is burst before one takes one step into the turbine hall. This is not to say the show smacks of indifference, the opposite actually holds true. The survey itself, though not inclusive of all types of voyeurism or surveillance, does take a look at sexuality and death with a less condemning eye than one would suspect. Given Baker’s interest in Surrealism, these two notions do not fall far from the academic tree.
The strongest points of this exhibition are in the content of historical images versus the contemporary image maker’s versions of surveillance. In effect, the balance of vintage images (pre-1950) to that of post war and contemporary is about even from recollection. It has the benefit of not being a lopsided elephant in the sense that bases are covered, and we are not left yawning over the historical attributes, nor am I left annoyed that some recent graduate is getting undue attention.

In the second room (Room 2) of photographs I was confronted with two of the most beautiful Paul Strand platinum images from 1916. The images are within Paul Strand’s larger body of “Shot from the hip” photographs of New Yorkers. Most famously, and lacking (good move I think) is the iconic image of the “Blind” woman, which is considered an icon of photography no matter what the implications are of photographing a visually impaired person. The prints used in the exhibition, “Man”, “Five Points Square” and “Woman” are from the same body of work, but they are slightly less loaded than the image of the “Blind” woman. The print quality of each respective print is amazing and bode well for historical involvement for the rest of the exhibition.
Amongst various images by Lewis Hine are superb vintage images of New York city tenement dwellers by Jacob Riis, whose influential book on the matter led to social change in the cramped conditions of the poor in New York, as much as Hine’s images of child labour begat a massive campaign for the future of the youth as it was then. The idea of using these surveillance or insider images for social change is just one of surveillance photography’s positive contrabutions
Further along in the exhibition, there is a slight change with the vintage works shown. We oscillate from historical imperative to one of artistic practice. In particular, Harry Callahan’s images of starkly illuminated faces of women create the crucible of the voyeuristic in photography. These images were made by Callahan as he walked the streets of Chicago taking quick snaps of unsuspecting strangers. Mirroring these images are also Walker Evans hidden camera photographs made on the NYC subway and Garry Winogrand’s images from “Women are Beautiful”. This series in particular interests me in the sense that the photographer as voyeur is completely obvious and explicit.

The notion of artistically categorized images exhibited is a nuance in this show as they stem from the photographer’s actual desires (male or not) and the camera’s ability to make permanent the retinal or libidinal desires of the photographer/artist. In this capacity, I want to point out that there is less material of an anonymous or personal type here. Many of the image makers presented in this show are of the historically mentioned or artistically culled. What is missing is any sense of the private sphere. For example, intimate sexual couplings or family events hidden from the outside world on points or self censorship or practicality and recorded by Polaroid are a sadly missing.

The Polaroid camera by its very insistence produces images of a private & personal nature allow for the practitioner to send, receive, and make permanent a catalogue of experiences and moments once reserved for the professional community or serious amateur. There is no need for developing lab or the inclusion of its workers receiving the personal image. It does differ from say Polaroids of a loved one’s birthday or a recorded holiday which would be shared later in albums, etc. By leaving out images by anonymous Polaroid makers, the exhibit fails in terms of not only topical interest (Polaroid is still selling the collection next month) but also the most basic forms of photographic inter-communication and later re-contextualization of the amateur photographer. Alfred Kinsey would be vastly disappointed.

The images while fed to us in an exhibition guise are in need of the public’s own personal interaction with voyeurism and surveillance. Whereby it is ok for the institutions and artist to participate and add that extra level of irony, the public unless recorded, does not participate much in this exhibition save for one room.

There is a room that does play with the idea of interaction and oddly enough “relational aesthetics” (Bourillard). In Room 10, which is classified as “Witnessing Violence”, there are amongst many vintage images of the American civil war, William Saunders’s images at a Chinese beheading, and very rare images of concentration camps. A CCTV/convenience store camera is set high up on the wall, so as to be unobserved by the gallery goers. Participants are allowed to stand in front of the monitor and be recorded. Unfortunately, the room that this contraption is set in is a side gallery and the process is slightly out of context due to the historical images beside it. What I give in points for interaction, I must take away in slightly awkward exhibition design. Oddly enough, while the lecture was being given by Mr. Baker and Ms. Gilman, there was some sort of vast disclaimer about the room which housed the contraption. I was met with “we decided to make this room off to the side to let people make their own decisions regarding the viewing of material”. I found this a little bit difficult to speculate on before entering, as I had just viewed a series of images of people falling to their deaths due to a Fire at the Ambassador Hotel by Italian photographer Marcello Geppetti. The images were incredibly graphic renditions of people jumping from the hotel windows to their deaths below. All I could think of was the 9/11 footage of the peppered streaks falling down the building that September morning nearly a decade ago. It did not make viewing the images in the supposed “difficult viewing” room any less affecting. I just think that if you are going to go about disclaimers, there is no point to keeping it in one room, unless we are taking images of the holocaust as more affecting than that of serial suicide photographs. It was suggested to me that this may be a way for Tate to cover their own bases of public responsibility by offering a way out for children or persons of a queasy nature an exit. I think in this respect, I feel a slight bit of remorse at the suggestion as it would negate any real responsibility for showing tough subject matter. Not to mention who decides what is “over the top” in an exhibition featuring suicides, pregnant heroin abusers, and general misanthropy found in the minutiae of violence interspersed throughout the main halls of the exhibition.
Some of the modern or contemporary images of note are Phillip Lorca DiCorcia’s images of “Heads” made in New York City. I remember buying this book some time ago from which the series is drawn. The basic principal is that an unsuspecting person walking the sidewalks of NYC in the late 90’s/early 2000’s would step on a censor which triggered a flash. The resulting image was then recorded by a telephoto lens some distance away. The results are interesting bordering on commendable. The images show normal, average, pock marked, obese, or just everyday people walking the streets of New York, but when the flash is applied and the image is blown up to a large scale, the sitters take on a sense of purpose, even glamour. This practice of raising “Breughel’s peasants” to a more elevated level is a clear act of trespass. It simultaneously says “this could be made better” while also trying to capitalize on the everyday. This is a hard line to walk and I am not sure from a personal stance whether it is unjust or just really clever. It begs more questions which the whole nature of a show like this is supposed to be about.

This notion of pseudo paparazzi like image making does however take a backseat to the real thing. In Room 4 titled “Celebrity and the Public Gaze” are an amount of images by actual paparazzi masters like Ron Gallela and Tazzio Secchiaroli. Gallela is likely the more notorious of the two as the photographer’s normal Studio 54 pop shots are left behind for his intensive and intrusive images of Jackie-O on his “Summer in Skorpios, Jackie Taking a Swim”, 1970 images. Apparently, the result of Gallella’s career chasing and nuanced photographic investigation of Onassis led to an eventual court litigation in which the photographer had to by order of law, stop hounding Miss Onassis. Gallela has fashioned a career out of the often pernicious worlds of the public and private document.

The above being said, a slightly more whimsical series of prints by Tazzio Secchiaroli depicting Anita Ekberg and Husband Anthony Steel lead to a semi-comical end as Secchiaroli manages to photograph an increasingly angered Steel frame by frame even after he loses his cool and chases another paparazzo away.

Moving further into contemporary practice, we have what I perceive as the obligatory Sophie Calle images. Though quite fun and very much on the mark for the exhibition, I can’t help but find the work a decade too late to be really effective. That and with the recent Whitechapel show, I just feel oversaturated with her work, no matter how good it is/was. The works are different than Alison Jackson’s staged images of Royalty and celebrity. I find these images though more populist, to be a better take on the idea of the voyeur than that of Calle’s. With Jackson, I appreciate the amount of work that goes into the single image produced. Instead of relying on the potential environment for exhibition that Calle does...re: high ceiling, “stack em’ high n wide” whitespaces, these images can be read as one offs, which makes the point of celebrity fascination and the staged image most poignant. What Jackson’s works miss in critical (relational aesthetics again) aptitude, they make up for in popular imagination, which is not a small benefit. These images also present an interesting parallel to Giuseppe Primoldi’s late 19thcentury photographs of celebrities. In particular, the image of Degas coming out of a Pissoir/Vespasian in 1889 fully relieved.

Speaking more on the topic of obligatory entries for this exhibition, I find Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” in slide format as it was originally intended a necessary inclusion. Although, and I could be well wrong here, I believe the initial soundtrack was a bit more mixed. What I heard in the gallery was a mishmash of religious or very drawn bits of music. Bleak may be the right word. I remember seeing a similar slide show of Goldin’s at Pompidou last year which was terrible due to the warbling soundtrack. At any rate, I enjoyed seeing the slide show, as it was pertinent. In this same vein of “gotta have it”, is Mary Alpern’s images from her series “Dirty Windows”. Being a fan of the series myself, I don’t have much to say apart from that it is was expected and looked great in the show.

On a perhaps less obvious front were contemporary works by Jonathan Olley whose images of the English architectural presence in Northern Ireland is an epiphany and some of the only images which really show the military industrial complex as it relates to surveillance. Though not absolute as a “theatre of war”, the images are certainly reflective of the issues of surveillance, the camera, and its control for a population. It is scary stuff and does remind the viewer of the unconscious humanitarian issues that comes part and parcel with the industrialized camera.
I just want to note here that there was little emphasis placed on the idea of borderlands or grey areas of surveillance and the way the camera handles human traffic (legit or not) across sieve like pieces of land tracts. There was very little mentioned on Mexico/American border patrols or the Icon of 20th century Political divide as seen on, around, or above the Berlin Wall. It simply did not factor. As a collector who has images of the guard towers at Check Point Charley, etc, I can only say this was a major absence as was the archival images from Stasi informants, etc. These images should have been front and central for this exhibition and sadly, they were not. This is a slight bone of contention for me as most of the 20th century’s development has to do with this infrastructure of militarized technology and population control through image and commerce.

Among the fair to mention and disappointing exclusions for this show are a number of formats and historical movements that remain uncovered for now. I will try and simplify this outgoing list as to put a small underlining checklist to the report card of “to be improved upon”.

1. Berlin Wall, Communism, Stasi
a) Although this is shored up a bit with images of Soviet spies around the world

2. Medical or invasive surgical images would solidify the most internal or least easily photographed personal spaces as would x-rays! Images of the ASYLUM.

3. Border Patrols

a) Mexico/America
b )North Korea/South Korea
c) Communist borders

4. Nudist retreats
a) Where is the Arbus?
b) German Naturist movement?

5. Gated Communities and Utopian communities.

6. Polaroid images of a personal nature

7. New Media
a) there is not one single computer or webcam in the whole show, let alone YouTube, social networking, or other forms of tenuous privacy topics.

8. Google Maps anyone?
This missing element, like that of the Berlin wall really fails. As this is not exactly an overall chronological summary of surveillance and voyeurism, the fact that these elements were not included is a bit discouraging I have to admit. Though many of these topics are not easy and do raise further questions leading outside of the main theme, I do think the inclusion of a few would have been necessary.

9. Baghdad Calling.
Geert van Kesteren’s work with collated cell phone images, etc of a wartime Iraq are incredibly important on the normative role of surveillance or seeing from the outside IN. This sort of practical application for a populist reclamation of photography went undigested and I feel somehow cheated of its exclusion.

In conclusion, I found the show informative, nearly graceful in historical application, and genuinely interesting. It had its shortcomings, but overall most bases were covered, there was ample work, but there were inevitable problems aside from the political discourse. Certain exclusions of material were felt quite heavily, but it does not capsize the greater good. I commend the Tate, Simon Baker, and Sandra Gilman for the most part. The topic of surveillance is incredibly important in a world full of tools making our lives more compacted, more notated, and more illustrated for the better and worse. This general infrastructure of display captures the camera’s ability to protect as well as serve.

Text by Brad Feuerhelm

www.ordinary-light.com
mail@ordinary-light.com
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REVIEW: Body to Body

London-based vintage photography dealer ORDINARY-LIGHT’s Body to Body: Dita Von Teese meets The Priapic Photographer previewed with an open reception on May 14th from 6-9 pm. The public viewing was held in conjunction with HotShoe Gallery’s Romanian Pavilion opening. Body to Body includes a selection of photographs of burlesque sensation Dita Von Teese by Chas Ray Krider displayed alongside the erotic photographic works of Frederic Fontenoy. Fontenoy’s autoerotic photographs explore surrealist motifs within the erotic genre. Krider’s images of Von Teese are vintage c-prints and many of the photographs are published in Krider’s book Motel Fetish. Fontenoy’s images included in Body to Body are available in an edition.

Included in ORDINARY-LIGHT’s display is one of Krider’s images of Von Teese standing in black stiletto heels atop a hotel nightstand, her black thigh-high stocking clad legs flanked by two lamps. With raised arms gently brushing back her raven hair, Von Teese demurely looks down past her black leather heels and toward the flower-printed bedspread. This image, which has sold at auction in recent months, is a mild flirtation compared to the more openly coquettish image in the rest of the series.

In another of Krider’s images of Von Teese, the voluptuous seductress is framed between two almost as equally curvaceous lamps. The shades of the bedside lights are symmetrically cocked toward Von Teese, illuminating her bare breasts and light blue corset, but keeping the burlesque starlet’s face in shadow. Von Teese is fastened snugly into a satin corset, her tiny waist emphasized with each descending clasp. Though her face is not directly lit by the brass table lamps, Von Teese’s features are visible. Von Teese’s lips are painted a deep crimson and her brows are slightly arched, her brown eyes maintaining full contact with the viewer. Von Teese is perched on a mahogany table, her satin-gloved hands resting lightly on the smooth finish with her legs crossed and dangling over the edge. Her feet are buckled tightly into sparkling silver platform heels, the thin straps encircling Von Teese’s slender ankles and mimicking the smooth shape of the body-hugging corset.

In one of Fontenoy’s bedroom scenes, the focus is selectively on the image plane of a large format camera that stands between the viewer and a woman lying on the bed. The body of the camera conceals the woman as she lays, legs open and inverted against the headrest. The scene reminds us of our place as voyeur, forcing us to look through a second lens and doubly framing the splayed legs of the subject as they are reflected on the glass surface of the view camera.


This project will be on display by ORDINARY-LIGHT Photography until 18 June 2010 at HotShoe Gallery and is available for viewing by appointment only.

Contact: +44 (0) 20 7831 7991 or mail@ordinary-light.com

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Body to Body: Dita Von Teese meets The Priapic Photographer.

The Photography of Chas Ray Krider and Frederic Fontenoy

May 15th - June 18th, 2010

Open Preview Reception May 14th from 6-9 p.m.

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ORDINARY-LIGHT Photography @ HotShoe Gallery

29-31 Saffron Hill
London, EC1N 8SW

On May 15th, the Photographs of Burlesque sensation Dita Von Teese by Chas Ray Krider will go on view alongside the erotic photographic works of Frederic Fontenoy at ORDINARY-LIGHT Photography, London. The photographs of Dita Von Teese are large scale colour images from Krider’s book “Motel Fetish”. The images will be juxtaposed against the auto-erotic photographs of photographer Frederic Fontenoy whose work encompasses surreal tendencies within the erotic milieu. This is the first time either artist will show these works in London.

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ORDINARY-LIGHT Photography @ HotShoe Gallery

29-31 Saffron Hill

London, EC1N 8SW

Phone: +44 (0) 207 837 1110

Email: mail@ordinary-light.com

Web: http://www.ordinary-light.com

POLAROID PERFORMANCE

An interesting lot of Polaroid photographs, circa 1984. All I have been able to find out about the woman's life is that her name appears to be Cathy. These images are shot by one other person who may have lived with her, say a girlfriend or a lover, I cannot be sure. There are one or two portraits that suggest strong friendship over coupling.

The images are reminiscent of the relationship between Cookie Mueller and Nan Goldin for which the latter published under Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Unfortunately Cookie had an overdose not long after.

These images express a very interesting take on personal performance and instant gratification with Polaroid film. The gestures are loose and full of life as opposed to being claustrophobically staged to the point of artifice.

“Cathy” seems to take pleasure out of the experience and its perhaps best not to read too much into these images, but they do entertain a somehow bizarre association with identity, performance, and the Polaroid instant camera.

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To view the entire collection of these photographs visit ORDINARY-LIGHT on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ordinary-light/sets/72157623789059888/

ORDINARY-LIGHT Photography
http://www.ordinary-light.com
mail@ordinary-light.com

ON THE CONSPICUOUS PROBLEMS WITH ‘CONFLICT PHOTOGRAPHY’ ON GALLERY WALLS

REFLECTIONS ON A PANEL DISCUSSION OF 'CONFLICHT PHOTOGRAPHY' AT THE LONDON ART FAIR.


I have to hand it to the London Art Fair. Not only do they work very hard to bring attention to the range of dealers in and around London, they are also champions of photographic inclusion with their ‘project space’ and also Photo50. The London Art Fair is working very hard to have some dialogue with photography, and they deliver it with lectures and the display of young talent at their fair. This year, I attended a panel lecture entitled ‘Documenting conflict: factual record or fine art?’ given by the following:

- Sophie Wright: culture and print room director, Magnum Photos.
- Kathleen Palmer: acting head of art at the Imperial War Museum.
- Francis Hodgson: FT Photography writer and former head of photographs at Sotheby’s.
- Dr. Julian Stallabrass: reader, Courtauld Institute of Art

The discussion began to a packed room, with Sophie Wright initiating the discussion with a selection of images from the Magnum archive. The point here was to illustrate the historical images of war/conflict photography, but Wright also included Antoine D’Agata’s superb images of self-abuse through drugs and sexual exploits (and I do mean exploits) all hand-crafted (with Francis Bacon’s painterly gestures) to the figure through long exposures in the dim dens of explosive sexual tensions which D’Agata used to frequent.
Perhaps the most important of the topics the panel touched upon was how we interpret the reportage and quantifiably artistic aspects of war photography. All of the key players were brought into focus, from Don McCullin to more recent images makers like Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin – whose abstract images of exposed colour paper in Afghanistan question the role of photographer, representation, and photography in war. It is of note that Broomberg and Chanarin are not typical photojournalists, but more akin to artists who are interested in documents, and the manipulation of documents.
Many of the works in the project space had much to do with these issues. Our own booth bore the atomic bomb element, while just across the way at Gallery F5,6 (from Munich) was an arresting series of works by British conceptualist photographer (again, not photojournalist) John Goto, whose works were two-sided images hung in double glassed frames; one side of each being an interesting image that looked much more like an abstract painting from the 1960s than a photograph. On the other side of these more abstract images were the actual images that Goto had taken the blown up pixilation from – images of human atrocity he had found on the internet. Small slices of these images were pulled to create the pixelated and beautiful abstraction that hung on the wall – the obvious references to beauty, reality, and destruction/abjection were made clear through the presentation.
The panel certainly had made very plausible points for discussion, but I want to focus on a question that I put forward to the panel in general.

My question was:
How do we as a society deal with contemporary photojournalists or conflict photographers, when we now have certain ‘agencies of agenda’ that promote their works to be seen in the commercial venture of the gallery, or adulation of the museum show? Can we reason that a photojournalist (an aforethought ‘objective’ recorder of truth) is still to have the same intentions in war/conflict when we know he/she may be also shooting these images with the thought of selling them to collectors or museums, and not just news agencies?

Before we start, I should make a note of what my definition of an ‘agency of agenda’ in photography is. In the simplest notion, an agency of agenda is a paradigm that governs someone’s actions, or ultimate desire for approval, in a certain format of image-making. If we use the example of a photographer (as is pertinent), I believe one agency of agenda could also be very similar to say what A.D. Coleman refers to as the ‘directorial mode’. There are various directives that work within the set of these agencies. One is not better than the other, but their shared outcomes are very different, and in respect to humanitarian or journalistic objectives we should resign ourselves to understand the difficult nature that some of these agencies represent.
My concern here is that a new agency of agenda within journalistic/conflict/war/objective-based photography could be a commercial directive that informs a particular work. Instead of shooting an image for, let’s say, an inherent truth (and yes, I am all too aware of the problem of objective-based truths in image making...) or a recorded document, we now have a set of characteristics which govern the photographer’s need to sell, or be placed within the context of an artistic practice. This mode can be sometimes rendered through installation – the size of the photograph; the implementation of gratuitous Photoshop enhancements, etc. This situation becomes uneasy when we begin to liken this agency to a subjective narrative, thereby further complicating our implicit belief that the image itself has a currency to it that needs little reimbursement from commercial agencies other than the supposed ‘truth’ of the document, and the press-pack pay cheque.

When we look at the works of Luc Delahaye, for example, we have a perfect example of these notions or potential agencies at work. In his seminal work ‘Recent History’ we have what began as a stylized war photograph now morphed into a work of art derived from (as some critics have sought to reason) the work of Gustave Courbet – a French nineteenth century academic painter. This particular work of Delahaye’s is often referenced alongside Courbet’s ‘A Burial at Ornans’ (1851). The compositional elements and general death/funerary theme are readily seen, as is the large scale and painterly colour palette. Gone from this large body of work is the rhetoric befitting a simple war document – as it is blown up into large scale and all of these particulars fall into place, we now see something new defining it. None of these implements, however, are problematic in the scope of photography. The problem lies in what we interpret the photographer’s intention to be when he made this image of war torn agony. As a direct record of conflict, it stands to devalue the loss of human life when placed in the context of an art gallery. It is as if to say ‘here is my artistic gift to the museum or gallery venture. I stand here as testament to a truly horrible situation and I further stand to make this tragedy into that of a historical painting which can be bought and sold or sponsored in high currency’.
Are we to really believe that this allusion to the past, and the idea of history-painting as it relates to the commission-based granting of yore, actually quantifies the agony of the people involved when we speak about editions or museum layout? Whether Delahaye (again, as an example) meant any malice or not, we must surely ask ourselves why his pursuit and rendering of this type of image exacts a fair exchange in the artistic commercial arena? Can we really value these images in editions or museum shows at the cost of the simple notion of human currency over artistic need? And further, can we justify heralding these image makers with shows and sales when we know that by their very intent of agency (gallery show/commercial/museum, etc.) we are giving into a spectacle that will be renumerated with hard cash and adulation?
How does this challenge our perception of the photographic document when we know the collaborator/photographer is implicit in governing his abilities to make an image of tragedy for sale, or available for paid viewing? Why do we exemplify with shows, sales, gallery etc. this new breed of supposed photojournalists, when their initial intent must be to make sales or be revered in the museum or gallery context? How can we trust their images? Why do we exemplify this behaviour? Or does the problem lay with us, as viewers? Do we have the need to encourage this narrative of inhumanity for the sake of something to put on our walls, or be titillated by, because we are that debased, that into our art investment portfolios, that into our need for exploitation?

O.K, I realise that this is all a bit long-winded, but I did expect to get at least some answers, seeing as part of the discussion was related to the idea of conflict photography in the fine art arena. However, let it be clear that I am not at all sure my question was properly understood, but seeing that I wasn’t asked to elaborate further, I gave them a fair chance to respond. Sophie Wright’s immediate reaction to my question regarded more her own position at Magnum, and how the role of Magnum itself was undergoing some format of change due to the taking-on of photographers like Antoine D’Agata, etc. She was very quick to point out that the former role of Magnum as a press agency (albeit one that played by its own rules...) was no longer the same; and that they, in fact, had no issue with distributing these images (or Sebastian Salgado or James Nachtwey images...) to galleries as well as press teams. My exact point, however, was more about the dichotomy presented to the photojournalist and his initial interests shifting from objective records to commercial venture, and how the trust that we (as a society) should not question intent when faced with the ugly side of commercial venture. It isn’t that I do not realize that everybody who picks up a camera has a vested interest in the subjects ‘bad’ or ‘good’. I just feel the need to understand the role that money plays in a photographer’s interest in being a recorder of events.

The point of this may be eclipsed by the fact that throughout photographic history there have always been photographers who used the artist laws of composition (or, for lack of better a term, ‘picture-making’) to report on the travesties of war. Examples abound – Gardner’s ‘Dead Rebel Sharpshooter’ and Fenton’s ‘In the shadow of the valley of death’ have both been examined in their capacity for truth.
It is known that Gardner moved some bodies around to make better photographs, and that Fenton recorded his experience by moving some 280 cannon balls around so as to better ‘get the picture’; but I really want to know why we continue to place importance on photojournalists and war photographers and their efforts if they are somehow to end up as a exercise in financial gain or artistic celebration?

I agree that, under the circumstances, the level of bravery (or stupidity...) in the line of fire should not remain challenged; but I want to know why we are expected to give these photographers a validity that surpasses an art photographer, when their aims are certainly convoluted and close to the same desire if they sell the works on the gallery wall? Maybe I am deceiving myself to think Nachtwey’s ‘Inferno’ is a masterpiece of photojournalism and not an artistic canon of human suffering. Maybe I should have known Capa was a complete bullshitter from early on. After all, I read ‘Blood and Champagne’ and could only see Capa as a talented debutante who used his grit as a war photographer to step up a level in society. You see, if we reduce these qualities of the photographer we must also reduce the quality of the photographic record. We must reconsider the photographs of flag-raising in Iwo Jima, of the dead loyalist, and of the Eddie Adams-type executions of the world as they become spurious and add a very dangerous quality to truth and reality in photographic representation. We even might as well go back to courtroom drawings and etchings of important events, as in this context it is about as believable and reliable as a ‘representative’ photograph.

I think in our rush to herald photojournalism and conflict photography through the doors of the museum, we need to really re-examine our base notions of what we consider to be differing qualities of photographic document in practice. If we are going to continue to make distinctions of communications through photography then we must also begin to dissect the basis for each photographer’s ambition when we are challenged by the presentation of new agendas, or impetuses within the work. If we cannot distinguish between an objective notion of truth (at its base) from that which separates the final format of viewing in an art capacity, we surely cannot have a system of communications that solicits anything but a misappropriated sense of values.

Again, I want to thank the London Art Fair and its panel for putting forth a very highly charged and ponderous discussion on the idea of Conflict Photography. It is by these associations in the field that we all come to understand photography’s integral role to our lives, our art, and ultimately our society. Without careful attention to the detail of photographic intervention, we would never be able to promote further thought. I wish every event had as valued a discussion and panel representation.

For more information, please visit our website http://www.ordinary-light.com or email us mail@ordinary-light.com.

We also would like to take the opportunity to point out the following article written by Sophie Wright for the British Journal of photography. Sophie discusses the future of art photography not only within the London Art Fair, but also in the UK. For anybody interested in photography this article should be interesting.
http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=873387.

VINTAGE PHOTOGPRAPH SHOW OF ATOMIC BOMB

ATOMIC BOMB SHOW...THE DAY AFTER

A DETAILED REVIEW OF THE SHOW WILL BE UP SOON...BUT HERE ARE A FEW LINKS TO HIGHLIGHT THE SUCCESS OF THE SHOW AT THE LONDON ART FAIR 2010:

CULTURE 24

http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art75016

TELEGRAPH.CO.UK

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/6972963/Our-pick-for-London-Art-Fair-The-Atomic-Bomb.html

EVENING STANDARD

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23793940-explosive-images-of-atomic-tests-go-on-display-at-london-art-fair.do